Back in October, The New York Times issued a new set of social media guidelines for reporters. Among other things, it noted that “(i)n social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.”

And, thanks to the wonders of social media, we can now suss out that there are three reporters who probably aren’t going to have a great week dealing with their editors and HR, all thanks to their previous tweets.

According to The Daily Caller, screenshots from the Twitter accounts of the three Times reporters show them using the n-word, pushing anti-Semitic theories and trashing American soldiers.

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It’s really hard to tell which of these is the most serious, but at least two of them contain offensive remarks and one contains a racial slur.

We’ll start with Jugal Patel, a New York Times reporter who was spotted tweeting out “F— the military” in May of 2012.

He wasn’t the only Times journalist to tweet out an obscenity, either. Also in 2012, reporter Sapna Maheshwari tweeted this gem: “ORDERING FISH FILLET WILL NEVER BE THE SAME #n—-sinparis #watchthethrone @watchthethrone #FISHFILLET #thats—cray #TAGFRENZYHAPPYFRIDAY.”

“N—-s in Paris,” it’s worth noting, is a song from the “Watch the Throne” collaboration album between Jay-Z and Kanye West. “That s— cray,” meanwhile, is how terminally unhip thirty-somethings trying to sound hip say “that sort of thing is crazy” in the manner in which rappers did quite a while ago. (A manner which most employers tend to frown upon.)

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Maheshwari is currently covering advertising for The Times.

While The New York Times Afghanistan reporter Fahim Abed didn’t tweet out anything with ethnic slurs, he still decided to twice post a link to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that claims that Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was trained by Israel’s Mossad.

All of the tweets were up as of Friday morning and none of the reporters named in the report had tweeted out an apology.

That in itself is amazing. If they were going to use these accounts for work — and thusly carry along with them the blue checkmark of NYT-granted approval — you would think they might have had the consideration not to use ethnic slurs, curse out the military or link to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, or at least to scrub the accounts after the tweets were made. Nope. No such actions.

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Perhaps most tellingly is that, with the exception of Maheshwari’s devolution into racial slurs, all of this seems to fall on a certain side of the political spectrum. It’s not that anyone was cursing out the DNC or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group list. Instead, it’s the military and Israel. Quelle surprise.

Writing under a pseudonym, Cillian Zeal is a conservative writer who is currently living abroad in a country that doesn't value free speech and exercising it would put him in danger. He became a staunch right-winger at the age of three: While watching a clip of Ronald Reagan, he told his mother (to her great horror), "Mom, I'm a Republican." Except for a brief, scarring and inexplicable late high-school dalliance with Ralph Nader and his ilk, he's never looked back.
Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One, and football (of both American and world varieties). He is the proud owner of a very lazy West Highland white terrier and an extraordinary troublesome poodle mix of indeterminate provenance.